When comparing Dying Light vs Age of Empires III, the Slant community recommends Dying Light for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?”Dying Light is ranked 11th while Age of Empires III is ranked 42nd. The most important reason people chose Dying Light is:

The main protagonist is capable of scaling buildings, jumping over obstacles and vaulting over zombies with ease making traversing the open world city a lot more enjoyable.

Pros

Pro

Fluid parkour movement

The main protagonist is capable of scaling buildings, jumping over obstacles and vaulting over zombies with ease making traversing the open world city a lot more enjoyable.

Pro

Expansive weapon-crafting system

There are blueprints found throughout the gameworld that can be used to modify existing weapons in a wide variety of ways by adding various elements to them and creating weapons such as enemy seeking grenades, exploding throwing stars, and makeshift bats with nails through them.

Pro

Satisfying combat

The combat is impactful, visceral and offers a great deal of variety in terms of available weapons and different enemy types. It presents a reasonable amount of challenge that is rewarding to overcome and offers multiple ways of emerging victorious in each encounter.

Pro

Enjoyable co-operative multiplayer

Dying light features up to four player LAN and online co-op.

Pro

Rewarding side-missions

There's a wide variety of side-quests and a large chunk of them are multi-part adventures with great storytelling.

Pro

Graphics-gameplay balance

It is difficult to find good real time strategy games with aesthetics. Its high resolution graphics combined with fairly good RTS experience makes Age of Empires III a rare gem. Its AI and gameplay may not be up to the mark when compared to its predecessor, but still provides you a fair challenge.

Pro

Good selection of areas to play in

There are 8 different nations that the player can choose to lead to victory, each with their own different looking areas to explore. This makes for a good mix of differentiation of play depending on what the player chooses to use.

Pro

Card-based upgrades and reinforcements add more to each match

Age of Empires III features a new and unique card-based system that allows for you to deploy additional units and resources from your Town Hall. By eliminating enemy units and buildings, you are awarded experience, which not only goes toward your City Level (allowing you to purchase more cards out-of-match), but allows you to activate a card in-game. These cards can grant you additional soldiers, increase gathering speed of Banks and Workers, or even a fort that you can deploy anywhere in the map.

Pro

Wide selection of missions

Players will see many different missions ranging from rescue missions to defensive missions. What is even better is that many of these types of missions will be mixed together into one, so there is a varying structure to each making for a different feeling to each.

Cons

Con

Poor VR UI

Things such as subtitles, instructions, menus, prompts, etc are hard to see clearly.

Con

VR has a downgraded visual experience

VR version of the game is low fidelity and introduces visual glitches that the standard version doesn't have.

Con

VR may cause motion sickness

In addition to some minor persistence issues, there are some sensory information mismatch issues created by the in-game characters movements and players stationary position that can easily induce nausea. The issue is a lot more prominent during cut-scenes that take the control away from the player completely.

Con

Poor multithreading

Sadly Dying Light does not do multi-threading very well which results in low framerates. For a modern game that is to be played on consoles with 8 cores or PCs that also have multiple cores, to not take advantage of proper multi-threading is pretty mind boggling. Really it just comes down to laziness, something that is not new to Techland and their poorly optimized ports.

Con

Poor plot and characters

The story is nothing new with many elements that are too familiar at this point. A Reluctant hero and a cold government agent mixed with a plot that can bee seen from miles away points to a lack of imagination while trying to create a game for the masses.

Con

Enabling VR support isn't straightforward

Enabling VR support requires editing config files. Instructions can be found here.

Con

Strategy is highly lacking

Any hope of strategic depth in Age of Empires III is quickly dashed as many Multi-Player games quickly devolve into matches based solely upon amassing a large, singular army and throwing it at the enemy base ad infinitum. While the game does attempt to make terrain weigh in on how you can move your army, it serves only to restrict certain units from moving on it, and little else. Terrain does not affect sight or range of units, and acts solely as a placebo to make players think there is some strategic advantage if they don't know otherwise.

Con

Easily manipulated AI

During AI skirmishes, you can easily fortify your location with walls, cannon towers, and forts, ensuring that the AI continually sends large armies to their deaths. The AI will also only send their units to one certain spot of your base, thus you will always know where they will come from and which portion to build defenses at. Once your base is fortified enough, you can simply farm for experience, until no more can be gained, and then easily wipe your AI opponent out, making for one-note style of play

Con

Could use better sound cues

Keeping track of ones units can become a difficult job (but a fun one) and having audio cues of when something is happening to your units could greatly help in this area, sadly there is very little of this in the game and could have been utilized better.